This site is my way to share my views and general business and IT information with you about Microsoft, IT solutions for ISVs, technologists and businesses, large and small. I specialise in Windows Intune and SBS 2008.

Since I’ve been working on the Windows Intune book I’ve found a few sources of information that I trust regarding the product. I thought I would share them: Windows Intune V1 (current production environment) Service Status Dashboard - http://status.manage.microsoft.com/Statuspage/servicedashboard.aspx Facebook Page - https://www.facebook.com/WindowsIntune?sk=wall Mike Resseler’s blog from the Belgium System Center User Group - http://scug.be/blogs/intune/default.aspx Windows Intune Team Blog - http://blogs.technet.com/b/windowsintune/ Windows Intune V2 (beta) Beta fact sheet, documenting the changes between the current V1 product and the V2 beta - http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?id=26704 Finally, if you want to read my book as it is written - https://www.packtpub.com/microsoft-windows-intune-quickstart-administration-enterprise-through-cloud/book ttfn David Technorati Tags: Windows Intune

Well, I’ve finally finished the drafts for all chapters of the soon to be published book called Microsoft Windows Intune, Quickstart Administration . It would have been sooner if my lovely mother had not fallen ill and passed away. I don’t regret the delay in finishing the book, but that we had so little time in the end and that she was not here to see it finish. The book is now awaiting review and editorial updates before it is finally published. Update - 2/10/2010 - Since the launch of Windows Intune V2 is so close, I'm updating to V2 now. This means that you can no longer access the work in progress chapters. I hope to resolve this in a few weeks time. The book has undergone some structural changes while I was writing it. The chapters are now: 1. Overview of Cloud Computing 2. Introduction to PC Management Concepts 3. Overview of Windows Intune Features 4. Signing up for Intune and installing the client software 5. Configuring Windows Intune 6. Configuring management policy 7. Tracking and reporting 8. Monitoring and dealing with alerts, including remote assistance 9. Resolving problems using Microsoft DaRT 10.Using and deploying Windows 7 Enterprise with Windows Intune 11.Integration with existing Microsoft Products You can access the book “in progress” and buy it from here . Once this is solidly out the way and the V2 beta has stabilised I will look to work on a V2 book too. ttfn David Technorati Tags: Windows Intune

When using a cloud service, understanding the reliability of the service is vital. Windows Intune is a management tool and as such, when the service is down it is only management that cannot be performed, rather than the computers going offline themselves, which means the impact is much less to the end users. The Service Status Page provides that information for Windows Intune. You can see on the image below that you can also scroll back over the last 5 weeks to see what has happened. The good thing here is that it is a sea of green for the last 5 weeks Hopefully it will stay that way. You can also see that there are at least two datacenters for each region, so an outage at one should not stop the service working. ttfn David Technorati Tags: Windows Intune